The practice of illegally copying and distributing digital games is
at the heart of one of the most heated and divisive debates in the
international games environment. Despite the substantial interest
in game piracy, there is very little objective information available
about its magnitude or its distribution across game titles and game
genres. This paper presents the first large-scale, open-method
analysis of the distribution of digital game titles, which was conducted
by monitoring the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing
protocol. The sample includes 173 games and a collection
period of three months from late 2010 to early 2011. With a total
of 12.6 million unique peers identified, it is the largest examination
of game piracy via P2P networks to date. The study provides
findings that reveal the magnitude of game piracy, the timefrequency
of game torrents, which genres that get pirated the
most, and the relationship between aggregated review scores and
ESRB-ratings.

The practice of illegally copying and distributing digital games is
at the heart of one of the most heated and divisive debates in the
international games environment, with stakeholders typically
viewing it as a very positive (pirates) or very negative (the industry,
policy makers). Despite the substantial interest in game piracy,
there is very little objective information available about its
magnitude or its distribution across game titles and game genres.
This paper presents a large-scale analysis of the illegal distribution
of digital game titles, which was conducted by monitoring the
BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol. The sample
includes 173 games and a collection period of three months from
late 2010 to early 2011. A total of 12.6 million unique peers were
identified, making this the largest examination of game piracy via
P2P networks to date. The ten most pirated titles encompass 5.27
million aggregated unique peers alone. In addition to genre, review
scores were found to be positively correlated with the logarithm
of the number of unique peers per game (p<0.05).